Blog

Tonight, Katie and I were escorted to the summit by a hawk and a guanaco.

So we did just two stars tonight, both with planets. These stars are bright, and at the infrared wavelengths where Clio is happy MagAO makes nearly perfect images. It’s nice to let MagAO be MagAO sometimes.

Tonight went really well we only had 6 communication errors on start-up of the ASM (whereas we often have thousands but most don’t bother us) — so the ASM is enjoying this warm weather we are having. As you can see for the photos below we had a surprise at the end of last night when the telescope’s instrument rotator got stuck with MagAO upside down. This was exciting for us since the Infrared camera Clio can’t be filled up if it is upside down. The telescope crew quickly fixed the problem after breakfast and Clio was filled with liquid nitrogen by 9AM. So all is good. Tonight the telescope rotator has been great.

We have had another great night of low winds and great seeing for almost the whole night. Tonight is my last night. I’ll be back in 2 weeks to help with the GMT Phase Cam experiment and to take down the system. Katie and Jared will continue to be the real heroes of MagAO –keeping the system/AO/Clio/VisAO all running perfectly as usual for our visiting astronomer friends.

So as the seeing gets worse I need to take my leave of running the AO system — and so today’s song:

We had a good night going. We think we’ve found a solution to the ASM electronics problem — one of us just has to get out of bed early and warm it up before dinner. That did the trick tonight, no problems since. But we’ve been stuck with a bum guider for the last 3 or 4 hours of the night. We need the guider to find the star, and occasionally to get the telescope in shape. Troubleshooting is in progress at dawn.

The observatory has been patrolled by several, up to 5 at a time, raptors since I’ve been here. This one was sitting on one of the GMTs new poles.

We got a real treat yesterday morning: this hawk was hunting vizzies behind the telescope. Watch how it uses the wind, and listen to the viscachas whistle. They don’t seem too worried though.

This song should be played loudly:

Tonight we noticed that our pyramid pupils look like Samoa(R) Girl Scout (R) cookies that Laird brought on behalf of his daughter:

We started the night with some ASM issues that prompted us to send up the bat-signal to our Italian colleagues:

Walking down the hill this morning, we saw fog in the valley and a hawk practicing hunting vizcachas:

Even if we don’t have specific song rules, yesterday’s song made me think of this one, which is amazing: